After days of speculation, Rachel Dolezal appeared on the Today show and declared herself transracial – and blamed other people’s misunderstanding of the term on why she came to be identified as black. “I was actually identified when I was doing human rights work in north Idaho as first transracial”, she said – in a construction that conveniently negated her agency in that decision – and explained that she never corrected subsequent media reports that she was biracial or black.

But transracial does not mean what some white Americans like Dolezal apparently wish it to mean. The term originates from adoptive and academic circles to describe the very lived experience of children raised in homes that are phenotypically and culturally different from their birth – people like my colleague Rebecca Carroll, who is black. She was raised in a white household and her white birth mother attempted to define her as “culturally white, and cosmetically black”.

The fact Dolezal once sued Harvard for discriminating against her as a white woman, speaks volumes about how genuine she is.

Dolezal’s messy theft and fiction of a black American identity uses the currency of a subculture of privilege that is rooted in white supremacy too. If anything, to believe that one can transfer one’s identity in this way is a privilege – maybe even the highest manifestation of white privilege. The ability to accept marginalization, to take on the identity of blackness without living the burdens of it and always knowing you could, on a whim, escape it, is not a transition to blackness; to use it to further your career or social aspirations is not to become black.

It is interesting to think about what it would mean if people could legally change their race, just as they can legally change their gender (which I support). Could you join an Iwi? Could you enrol on the Maori roll? Could you use a preferential entry scheme for university? Dolezal may set off a revolution!

Inandout

We have reached levels of decadence that would make Rome envious. Personally I hope to laugh myself to death at this declining culture long before TSHTF, but since everything works at Internet speeds now, I’m uneasily thinking I’ll still be around.

The Roman Empire had roads that allowed communication from one end of the Empire to the other, we have the Internet. Rome could only spread its decadence over the course of weeks and months, we can do it in milliseconds. For every 10 people that read about stuff like this, 9 reject it but one person says “hey, that sounds cool.”

Also, we don’t have to worry about Barbarians storming the gates, they’re already here, let in by our own Political Elite…..

Ed Snack

kowtow

berend

You can’t have it both ways.

But that’s the point in these progressive, equality ,human rights days. Not only can you change your gender ,the state will come to the party and reissue your birth certificate ,literally changing an historical fact!

Komata

One has to ask: Given her continued attempts to ‘ingratiate’ herself with Maori, and portray herself as being ‘one of them’ by self-identification, (and very definitely NOT European), does this make Catherine Delahunty the New Zealand equivalent of this woman?

Kimbo

If anything, to believe that one can transfer one’s identity in this way is a privilege – maybe even the highest manifestation of white privilege. The ability to accept marginalization, to take on the identity of blackness without living the burdens of it and always knowing you could, on a whim, escape it, is not a transition to blackness; to use it to further your career or social aspirations is not to become black.

Yeah, but this has been happening for decades. As Little Richard exclaimed repeatedly

“They gave Elvis a grammy? What for? He’s been singing my songs and stealing my style for years!”

stephieboy

I see that typically the righties and wing nuts on this thread are attempting to conflate the issue of Rachel Dolezal ‘s wrongdoing as an indictment on ” this pernicious breed of progressives and multiculturalists.”This is a case of plain fraud that both right and left can and do succumb too from time to time .

EAD, to compare this incidence to the decadence of Rome is ludicrous in the extreme The Roman Empire fell for a lot of complex reasons including fighting wars remote from centres of power- overexpansion.

David Garrett

David Garrett

Opps, dunno how I managed to do that…

Isnt it interesting that this is – quite rightly – being regarded as an outrageous deception in the US whereas here every second “Maori” is as white as she is? In other words we accept – and have accepted for some time – that you don’t actually need any Maori blood to be one, you just have to identify as Maori. (There was once a blood criterion to be “Maori”; does anyone know what the % was and when it became irrelevant?)

As someone has said, correctly I think, there is nothing stopping a person enrolling on the Maori roll but good luck getting in Ngai Tahu’s “Blue book” if you cannot prove blood connection to that iwi. And there’s another interesting thing: for Ngai Tahu, to be one of them you not only can’t be non Maori, but you can’t be just any old tangata whenua either; you must prove a BLOOD CONNECTION to their iwi. (Another question: does anyone know how much Ngai Tahu you have to be to get in the Blue Book and thus be entitled to some of the loot? Or at least some of the positive things generated by the loot)

Adolf Fiinkensein

Fentex

Fraudster Rachel Dolezal has claimed she is not a fraud, but she is transracial – a black woman born into a white body, just as a transgender person is someone born in the body of the wrong gender.

That’s kinda possible, but not I think in her case. Race is something other people assign to you – so if by happen-stance of birth you happened to grow up with a different appearance to your parents and general community and people within it decided you must be a different race then bingo – they’ve assigned you a trans-racial identity (imagine an albino born of dark skinned parents or vice versa, or a mixed up chromosome gave you different features).

Race is a social construct – it’s a classification people assign to others. No one takes blood and measures statistical variations of gene pairing to objectively deduce ‘race’, it is done on how you look to them and are filtered by how they’ve grown up and were taught to classify.

So it is possible for someone to be re-assigned their ‘race’ if they differ in appearance to the inheritance they might think defines them.

Only in this women’s case that hasn’t happened so much as she’s decided to costume herself differently. She might want to be what she thinks is Black in the U.S but it’s her want, not others.

But that makes for an interesting thought – suppose it’s true that a distinct Black culture exists in the U.S – why shouldn’t a person be able to freely choose a cultural identity for themselves? I don’t think they could claim to represent someone assigned a race by others, but why couldn’t they hop across cultures?

There’s a conflation of meanings where one word covers several bases – as a person can join or marry into the Jewish faith and become a Jew but not be descended from the ancient Judaic tribes why can’t a person decide to join (presuming one accepts it exists) the Black U.S culture even if not born what everyone in the U.S generally classifies as Black?

I think it’s silly, but for those who believe there’s a distinct Black culture surely it’s a logical possibility?

Komata

DG

The whole ‘I’m Maori, you’re not’ is a fascinating (if somewhat confused) area, especially as there are no longer any ‘pure-bloods’ left in the country. The whole’ Whitey go home’ thing thus becomes somewhat academic, but if it is suggested to some of the statement’s strongest proponents that in fact they are ‘Bounty Bars’ (‘Brown on the outside, white on the inside’), the reaction can become ‘interesting’, since it doesn’t fit the carefully constructed and rehearsed narrative, and such an ‘insight’ could perhaps deprive them of certain ‘benefits’ (’nuff said).

In respect of ‘percentage’, the last time I heard was that it was a sixteenth (down from an eighth) but this has been largely ‘sidelined’ by the ‘I feel therefore I am’ mantra which has been assiduously pushed over the last 20 or so years by those with vested interests (Delahunty would probably be a candidate for ‘acceptance’ under such a ‘clause’ BTW).

As I said, it’s a fascinating area, albeit one which is very fraught should one attempt to investigate it further…

Adolf Fiinkensein

kowtow

I’ve bumped into a few NZ whities ,who being progressives , love to tell people how moved they were at maori funerals (tangis) and they have to add , in a way they’ve never been moved at Christian funerals…….

I think it’s a form of STD.

…. they suffer from syndromatic transracial dysfunctionality , in that they want to convince themselves that Maori culture and spirituality is more valid or genuine than Honkies’.

They’re the same types who think we have a child poverty problem, and repeat the mantra “I’m very concerned about the growing gap between the rich and the poor in New Zealand”

Jack5

David Garrett (10.14) is partly right when he talks of the bloodline book of Ngai Tahu. But if you have any trace of Ngai Tahu, you’re in, and that can now be as little as one thirty-second, and in a few years, if not now, one sixty-fourth.

Perhaps someone else would recount for DG the scandal with the tribal stud book and the racial classification of a person associated with it, an affair that has some similarities to the present scandal involving the white-black woman from Spokane.

box345

“Allophilia” is the phenomenon of having a somewhat extravagant positive attitude for a group that is not one’s own.

Reason I know this is I once had (a European) Auckland girlfriend who had such a distorted guilt complex about perceived past injustices to Maori, that she actually wanted to be Maori to prove something. It was radically sick, I tell you. She went on after me to produce kids who had as much Maori blood in them as she could find — again purely for the sake of trying to prove something to anyone who was watching.

But in the process, I also discovered that it is a very common phenomenon in New Zealand. Very common indeed. I don’t exaggerate when I say that it is a phenomenon which extends all the way to the NZ Parliament.
In the light of this personal past experience, I totally recognise the Rachel Dolezal oddity.

Dennis Horne

David Garrett

the whole Rachel Dolezal story has been interesting on a number of levels…(as the lefties like to say), not least concerning the word “Wigger” which I always thought was a New Zealand invention..apparently not so; it is used in the US, and used in this very story. As a student of language usage, I find it very interesting that while the N word is so potent I don’t even dare use it, Wigger, from which it is derived, is used freely in stories about Ms Dolezal.

And Wiggers go back a while…there were many Catherine Delahunty types in the state house area I grew up in in Gisborne – although back then such people just effected the faux Maori accent…it was a few decades before Maori words began to become common knowledge. I wonder if my boyhood mate Whai Tuhaka is still in the Mob? Good joker…always fancied his sister…

Lance: On one level (sorry) you are right..but then it is very interesting how it is treated as a story in the US at all, whereas here faux Maori are entirely un-newsworthy…

Inandout

Claiming Maori heritage (via bloodline) is becoming more and more difficult when indiscriminate coupling by breeding mothers begets children whose father is often unknown. Tribal leaders will very soon have to resort to DNA testing to verify ‘genuine’ bloodlines, because merely having a Maori name doesn’t mean anything if the mother was too pissed or drugged at the time of conception. Our ancestors weren’t that stupid when they invented the institution of marriage, because it sure pays to have some record of lineage.

Akaroa

If all the energy, news-space and breath that’s wasted on black/white/coloured issues were channelled into something relevant, useful and productive we could all retire and live in comfort.

OK! I know that’s ridiculous, but why, oh why, do people keep hammering this stone-dead racist subject?. If you’re black you’re black and if you’re white you’re white. Nothing can change that so why not get on with life?

But then, I realise we are – as human beings – wired to be disdainful of people unlike us – be they black, white, light brown, off-white, oriental, or whatever.

Inandout

Urban Redneck

We are at the point where modern liberalism will inevitably twist itself into a pretzel over all of this nonsense (as evidenced by the pronouncements in DPF’s post)

You can not change your gender. It’s physically impossible. Nor can you change your race. Sure. you can mock it up pretty well these days with a mix of surgical procedures, cosmetics and Photoshopping, but none of it is real. Ms Dolezal is a Caucasian woman in blackface. Georgina Beyer is a man in a dress. Nothing more, nothing less.

I’m pretty sure the science is on the side of the godbotherers with this one!

Jack5

Re James Stephenson at 1.01:

With the high rate of intermarriage (and its more recent replacements), it is inevitable that within a few more generations everyone in New Zealand will be both pakeha and Maori. Intermarriage or the current equivalent, and increased urbanisation and movement around the country and to and from Australia, also mean, that, within Maoridom, tribes will blend into each other.

Oh, and as has been pointed out on this thread and others – if a person can pretend to be black and called out on it as being a fraud (like most in the media have), then I do not see how a man can claim to be a woman and be lionized for it.

Scott

Well if you can change your gender then surely it is okay to change your race? I mean she feels black. Basically there is a whole lot of left-wing bigotry against her and she needs to be confirmed as a black woman (when I say woman I mean to say that is what she prefers to be called now and does not in any way consign her to remaining a woman if indeed she wants to become a man or transgender person at some future date).

Indeed I am thankful for our Rachel because she is arguing what I have been arguing for a little while now. If a man can decide to become a woman because that is what he feels he is, then surely a white person can become a black person based on their feelings?

Or otherwise we could abandon the whole liberal experiment and go back to some sanity? Because taken to the nth degree as we are doing presently, liberalism is simply insane!

Urban Redneck

So, just for the record:

* A persons sexual behavior is innate and immutable, sewn into the very fabric into one’s DNA and can not change in any way.
* A man can, with the aid of penectomy and chondrolaryngoplasty surgery, hormone therapy and cosmetics can become a woman.
* A Caucasian with the aid of rhinoplasty surgery, collagen injections and cosmetics can not become a part African.

Mike

Garrett,

Your analogy fails to account for the different historical context of the two words. One was used in the context of a master-slave relationship with the intention of reinforcing the power imbalance and demeaning/degrading the subordinated party, the other is a cultural invention to describe urban whites who have internalized black culture. I can certainly understand why the former attracts condemnation whereas the latter doesn’t and am surprised that a lawyer (presumably trained in analogical reasoning) cannot.

Unity

Our World is getting to be more and more ridiculous by the minute. Now it seems we can be trans anything we want to be. We should all hop on the trans-Maori bandwagon and qualify for all the special funding and treatment.

I think it was 50% or more Maori blood we once needed to qualify as Maori in the Statutes. Which is how it should be. I’m not sure when that was changed but seem to think it was either during the Helen Clark years, or maybe David Lange, and you just needed to ‘feel’ like a Maori or have a ‘thread’ of Maori blood. So if we don’t want to be a trans-Maori, we could just ‘feel’ like one or ‘find’ a thread somewhere!!??

gump

It’s been sad watching this discussion devolve into a hate-fest against transgender people. Because there is literally a ton of medical research that clearly shows that transgender people have a legitimate medical condition which causes them considerable psychological anguish. The only reason they undergo gender-transition is because it offers them some relief from their torment.

Why this matters to anybody other than those people and their doctors is a mystery to me. The proper conservative approach would be to give them autonomy to make their own medical decisions, privacy, and respect.

Mike

Scott

“Thankfully the xenophobes (some of whom are present here) comprise a tiny minority of the voting electorate.”

Yes and when you lose an argument go to the liberal playbook and launch an ad hominem attack. Like the logic is incredibly inconsistent apart from the desire to turn existing norms and values upside down-

Gayness is controlled by your genes and cannot be changed, you are born that way.

Transgenderism is not controlled by your genes but is controlled by your feelings.

Race is still one the liberals are working out it seems- it will be a result of your genes or it may be controlled by your feelings, there may be a struggle but eventually the politically correct version will emerge.

You see a sensible ( that is non liberal) person might say –

– there is no gay gene, gayness is in the mind.

– you are born either male or female, it is your genes, it is not in your mind.

– race is a minor thing biologically but it does involve your genes, you cannot choose to be black based on your feelings.

I think that all makes sense and sums up things quite well! I am sure we can all agree? Yes- great I can go now, my work is done.

Mike

Thankfully people like “Scott” comprise a tiny minority of the voting electorate. They have no power, all they can do is sit at home on their keyboards and contribute to a body of literature which can be described as a candy-store for psychiatrists in training.

Bingo99

I’m not going to bother reading this predictable and tedious comments thread (though I’m guessing this matter was also used by the usual culprits as an excuse to dump on transgenders and “progressives” – sigh).

Though I’d note:

1. This issue is raising pretty universal scorn and incredulity around the world so clearly it’s not quite the evidence of the grand “progressive conspiracy” that the usual crowd on here would like it to be.

2. Kowotow – Despite averting my eyes I couldn’t help notice your early post – dude lighten up. The future really is bright – humanity continues to advance, live longer, live healthier, live more productive lives, inventing new things and enjoying a better quality of life. Everything points to this continuing as we… progress!

Robo

If race and gender are entirely fluid then any external distinction based on them rapidly becomes meaningless. Anyone can claim race/gender privileges, so soon no-one can (by definition not everyone can be privileged). Might be the beginning of the end of the whole gender/race based grievance industry… Might be a good thing……all just human afterall….

deadrightkev

I always thought Turiana Turia was a possible transracial. She had a very different name before politics and she had a strange understanding of NZ history. Something about a holocaust in Taranaki but no one had ever heard of it.

Bob R

Inthisdress

I think it is possible to identify with another racial group and do so to such an extent that one might ‘wish’ to become like that race. Remember ‘The Commitments’ “I’m black, and I’m prowd.”. There are countless Maori Polynesian and white youth who identify with African-American rap culture. I went through a ‘phase’ as a youth when I felt similarly and then wanted to embrace my Irish-ness. My point being that in the modern world, especially when you look at ‘Whiteness Studies’ in Australia, and the wide swathes of white liberal guilt that is present in certain academic circles, it was only a matter of time before some one came up with this.
Meanwhile:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehoomjQjfI